from my experience with various manufacturers, all of the levers themselves spin, but there are two companies that fuse their bat tops to the lever itself so they don’t move independently of each other. an “American” standard lever as made today is this by Industries Lorenzo the IL Eurostick. its taller than the Korean or Japanese companies versions. You will likely have to use a countersink method and a different mounting platein order to get this to fit in a standard arcadestick mount made for Japanese levers. I was able to do this on my Hori VLX Kuro since it is so large and deep. I’d imagine with a little bit of dremeling you could make it fit in the old HRAP arcadestick housings like the HRAP EX.

Alternatively, the Korean company Crown also has a fused battop and lever, the “FK” versions fit in the standard arcadestick housings made by Hori and Madcatz.

Yes, but even an IL or Korean stick will have the entire shaft assembly spin on its vertical axis.
I believe OP is asking for one where neither the ball/bat top spin, nor the shaft.

I’m not aware of any joystick models that are designed like that.
I’ve used something along those lines on a cheapo PS2 stick back in the day, and the shaft eventually tears itself out of the assembly due to your hands making very gradual and minute twists as you do QCF, DP, or 360 motions.

A picture would help but if you wanted to make something yourself IL Happ would be your best bet for all of your parts. If you wanted to buy a joystick and swap parts something big and american would be x arcade or pelican sticks. MK arcade collection stick was also big and had plenty of room for american parts. Street fighter 15th anniversary stick by pdp was another good box for swapping quality IL Happ parts.

Paradise arcade shop or there is also a an arcade called tornado terrys in texas I think that sells american parts for good prices (He even has the perfect 360 still). You can also buy them directly from IL Happ. Might want to consider what microswitches you like, cherry switches were popular but you see more omicron now I think, this goes for buttons and joysticks… hope this rant helped

There are a few joysticks in existence that have non rotating shafts, but they are few and far inbetween.
Also even if the Ball or bat top is molded into the joystick shaft, the shaft can still rotate.
Most of these joysticks are used in or designed for Flight controllers like what you see in a Virtual-on, Mech-Warrior or Cyber Sled Cab or in some Flight Simulator cab.

Non-rotating joysticks with a ball or bat top is exceptionally rare and hard to find, I can’t even tell you where to look for or what to look for.

I don’t think the current stock of American/European or Korean parts is what the OP is looking for.

The cabinet that impressed me is an old marvel vs capcom. The joystick was very fun to play with. The difference is that it was easy to keep a lose-grip on the top, which wouldn’t slip away from the hand no matter how “artful” I got with my stick inputs, which was hell’a fun!

So would I really have to find some discontinued legacy hardware if I wanted to produce a stick like this? sad face

and/or judging by ‘what sounds like my prefered style of play’, do you guys think that I might prefer the feel of a Korean style FK with the circle gate and all that jazz. I see that Infiltration uses one (I’m guessing in SF too), and that dude ‘can hang’ so…

Don’t worry about what works for other people, use what works for you. It’s all personal preferences.

I used to be all about the american parts and modded my SF2:AC joystick with Happ parts back in the day. I modded it to work on 360 when SF4 came out.

Then I made a new joystick with Sanwa parts just to try it. I hated it at first. But after a while, I got used to it. I still couldn’t use the square gate and had to use octo becaues I was used to the 360 motion of the american parts. I also tried a circle gate on it, but by that point, I didn’t like it anymore and only can use the octo gate.

Now when I go back to Happ parts it feels so clunky. Now I much prefer the Sanwa parts over the Happ parts. I do have a KI2 cabinet that has Happ parts though, and that feels fine because it’s an arcade cabinet. But for joysticks for console, I can’t really go back to Happ parts anymore. I much prefer Sanwa.

I may windup experimenting with Sanwa and a Crown (I mean these parts don’t ‘break the bank’). I’m looking forward to starting with a Crown however, because for w/e reason I’m attracted to the Korean input style (I mean I pretty much do it already). I screwed a bat on my shitty Chinese Sanwa-imitation 4gate Joystick, and so far so good.

My natural inclination is to let go of the stick for neutral, and float my hand around it in anticipation of my next moves in those moments when “doing nothing” is the best move. For this reason the Bat is what I like. I do well with the 4gate, but I’m really looking foward to being able to ‘roll’ the Joystick through quarter-circles from down/down-back/foward, and I imagine that ‘rubbery’ feeling progressive tension they say defines the K-sticks feels tight in more ways than one

…I am a’lil worried that short-cut shoryukens from down-forward may be harder to execute with grace, but I’ve still got a good feeling about it. After all, Infiltration executes flawlessly.

To close the subject on my end, I’m going to go with w/e is relatively popular on the market, because I don’t want to find myself the position of not being able to readily reproduce my ‘main squeeze’ should she become lost or damaged -.o